The OCZ Revodrive Hybrid 1TB PCIe SSD is OCZs pairing of their newly integrated Revo 3 line with Toshibas 1TB HDD, a much anticipated response to the consumers desire for SSD performance with HDD capacity.

Our review of the ‘Hybrid’ today, we promise you, will be unlike any other as we have stripped it down to its ‘barebone’ components and also tested it as it should have from the beginning, SSD, HDD and then as a full hybrid. Throw on this video and follow along!

THE BEGINNING

The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid arrived at The SSD Review just over a week ago and over 45 hours of background have gone into this report. I think I should point out right from the outset that this is not going to carry the same tag line as most, in that you won’t be overwhelmed by tons of graphs displaying the caches ability. It simply works.

Instead, we are going to take you on a trip, much as you were on in high school science, where we disect, rip apart, examine, test, and analyse our specimen before trying to sow things back up again. That is why our choice of Coldplays ‘The Scientist’ was so fitting.

INTRODUCTION

Since the first consumer SSD release back in ’07, there has been a huge void in the industry with respect to availability of a product with SSD speed and HDD capacity. The main contributor of this is the high cost of NAND flash memory which still stands true today, albeit, NAND cost has dropped significantly. A perfect example is seen in one of our first SSD reviews, the Memoright 128GB SSD, where this SLC (single level cell) SSD was available to the consumer at an unbelievable $3399.99 US.

This ‘void’ of performance, capacity and value seems to have been addressed in the OCZ release of the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid PCIe SSD.

SPECIFICATIONS

The Revo Hybrid is available in a single capacity of 1TB and its performance is detailed as 910MB/s read and 810MB/s write with 120,000 IOPS at 4k random aligned write disk access. It is a full height PCIe card which has 100GB dedicated cache and a 3 year limited warranty.

It is fully capable of supporting TRIM once Microsoft gets their ducks in a row, is compatible with both 32 and 64-bit systems with an open PCIe Gen 2 x4 slot and its heart is that of the OCZ Superscale Storage Controller and VCA 2.0 architecture.

It’s a nice concept, but I’d like to see it implemented in a bit more down-to-earth way: SSD with half the capacity, and a single-platter HDD (all to reduce material costs and energy consumption) would be perfect for me. It doesn’t always have to be the super-duper fastest and largest drive 😉

Benevolent Spectator

Can you clarify the TRIM support issue? I thought Windows 7 supports TRIM if it is enabled correctly.

“OCZ says the Revo 3Ã—2 Card supports TRIM because the architecture is based on SCSI. The MS Windows Storport architecture, however, does not presently support TRIM or SCSI UNMAP. Conversations with OCZ regarding this revealed that OCZ and Microsoft are working together and the functionality should be enabled in the near future.” from:

That is not correct. We have documented two separate ocasions where IMFT NAND flash memory was utilized in SSDs and the name of the flash made to reflect that of the company, the previous being SuperTalent.

That is not correct. We have documented two separate ocasions where IMFT NAND flash memory was utilized in SSDs and the name of the flash made to reflect that of the company, the previous being SuperTalent.Type your reply…

So, does it work on Linux and how well? That might be a much more important issue than Windows support – these SSDs are the best thing of the last decade for speeding up databases and other server operations! Team up with Phoronix if you are lacking Linux expertise 😉

You first download the drivers to a USB. During the Windows installation, it will come to a point where you need to insert the USB and select the drivers.

lind

I liked your review and would very much like to employ this in my system. I have a z800 I tried to install this card but it would not function. I could see it but could not access the drive. My 135gb sas drives were stripped and very fast but I needed more drive space but didn’t want to take a hair cut on speed. Any suggestions on how I might get this to function? I tried ocz, that was disappointing as they were of no assistance. thanks